What's the Point of Philosophy?
Does science really have nothing to say about the nature of consciousness?
Updated January 19, 2026 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Yesterday, the philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell offered a thoughtful reply ( see here ) to my melancholic reflections on panpsychism, materialism , and the state of philosophy . Unlike me, Dan Dennett, or—I suspect—most scientists studying the brain, Richard maintains that science is:
i) neutral between the view that consciousness is (to simplify) identical to parts of your brain and what goes on inside of it, and the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality, found in all particles of matter (or, for that matter, other theories such as dualism and idealism)
ii) to be sharply distinguished from philosophy.
Clearly, philosophers in their discussions on philosophical questions can hold radically different views on the meta-philosophical question of what philosophy is. Too often, philosophers argue about their alternative theories without getting into the meta-philosophical question of what makes one theory better than another. Perhaps more surprisingly, philosophers can have substantial agreement on first-order issues (I agree with much of Richard's excellent blog posts on ethical questions), while having fundamentally different views about second-order questions (my meta-ethical views on the nature of morality are radically different from those of Richard). So let me use this exchange as an opportunity to step back and reflect on the raison d'être of philosophy.
When I characterize the scientific study of consciousness as physicalist, Chappell responds:
I think this is a kind of stolen valor. There is nothing about the empirical study of consciousness that is inherently "physicalist". The science is (very obviously) unchanged if you adopt an epiphenomenalist dualist metaphysics, for example. Those are empirically indistinguishable philosophical theories. So it just seems like a category error to suggest that empirical science either presupposes or counts in favor of the one philosophical interpretation over the other. Disputes in the metaphysics of mind are philosophical, not scientific, and there's really no substitute for simply engaging in detail with the specific arguments for and against physicalism (and its competitors).
This claim strikes me as both observably and theoretically wrong.
In their practical work, neuroscientists are routinely influenced by their (more or less explicit) metaphysics of mind. René Descartes was a dualist, but also a scientist, and his view that the pineal gland (a small part of our brain) was the connection between the soul and the body was clearly a hypothesis. Now, if you removed the pineal gland, and humans continued to mostly go about their lives as before (which it turns out is what they do), even Descartes should have acknowledged that this should decrease our credence in dualism. Otherwise, one must suspect a wandering off into pseudophilosophy.
Richard correctly identifies me as a naturalist philosopher who thinks of philosophy and science as continuous, rather than separate realms. But he is mistaken to characterize a refusal to think of dualism, physicalism, and panpsychism as completely neutral, with respect to whatever scientists studying consciousness may discover, as an ideological and dogmatic commitment to naturalism. In fact, quite the opposite. Non-naturalism reflects a much more dogmatic intuitionist attitude about the inherent nature and limits of science and philosophy.
I don’t see any good pre-theoretical reasons to think that science and philosophy are marked by a sharp boundary . The idea may seem appealing since scientists and philosophers sit in different departments and write for different journals (*though I will note that I have published in science journals). But the prominent view of philosophy as an intellectually distinct activity is historically a fairly recent development, reflected by the rapid expansion of the sciences, which threatened the authoritative status of philosophy. More neutrally, natural philosophy is a shared activity of trying to understand the world and our place within it (with a nod to the philosopher Wilfried Sellars) that philosophers and scientists alike are contributing to.
If we commit ourselves to the view that alternative metaphysical views of the mind are scientifically indistinguishable, that reflects a very narrow view of how science operates. Scientists do not treat all theories making the same predictions as equally worthwhile. They are just as much engaged in “clarifying the comparative costs and benefits of the rival views on offer.” To defend the view that science has literally nothing to contribute to the evaluation of alternative philosophical theories—in comparing the costs and benefits of alternative theories—whether that be in the metaphysics of mind or meta-ethics, strikes me as a much more dogmatic commitment than even straw-man forms of naturalism that ask us to abandon philosophy departments outright.
To further support his view on the neutrality of science about philosophical theories of consciousness, Chapell continues by drawing a parallel to ethics:
It may be illuminating to consider analogies to ethics. Psychological science may study ethical behavior, reasoning, and other empirical correlates of what moral philosophers are interested in. But they can't directly grasp the thing itself. And while some may be inclined to reject moral realism (in favor of either error theory or some form of non-cognitivism) on the grounds of a prior ideological commitment to metaphysical naturalism, it's not like the dogmatic assertion of metaphysical naturalism itself constitutes any kind of philosophical "progress". Philosophical progress consists in clarifying the comparative costs and benefits of the rival views on offer. The past century of work in metaethics and metaphysics of mind alike have made significant strides on that front; far more than one would get from treating metaphysical naturalism as a dogma all this time.
This gives me a nice opportunity to draw on the common practice among effective altruists to hedge their bets about alternative views in ethics or science, which I suspect Chappell is also fond of. To not fully commit oneself to any particular theory and assign degrees of belief to alternative views (a toy example: 95% utilitarianism and 5% Kantianism), I think, can be very valuable given uncertainty and is something more philosophers should emulate, rather than dogmatically defend their pet theories.
One should not dogmatically commit oneself to one theory if the balance of reasons in favour of it only makes it mildly preferable to its alternatives. Why should we hold a different view on the methods of philosophy itself? Philosophy should be defined in terms of its goal: to understand the world, to reflect on how we should act, and so forth. Not by an a priori commitment to a particular method. After all, philosophical methods are incredibly pluralistic and have changed over time.
Unless one is committed to lending no credence to any version of naturalism being correct, whatsoever (which appears incredibly dogmatic) scientific progress does indeed constitute evidence for a materialist view of the mind.
And this evidence has rapidly accumulated over the last centuries since Descartes, evidence that would have made many dualists of that time shudder and drop their metaphysical commitment if they were around to see it. It is no wonder that a materialist view of the mind has rapidly increased as the default view among scientifically educated people. It is not a stretch to compare panpsychism and dualism to an old geocentric model of the universe that over time had less and less going in favour of it if we were to compare the “comparative costs and benefits of the rival views on offer.”
Veit, W. (2026). On the Evolution, Science, and Metaphysics of Consciousness. Adaptive Behavior . https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123251413204
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Walter Veit, Ph.D., is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reading.
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